Discover the captivating world of Hector Acuna‘s plein air painting, where bold compositions, vibrant experimentation, and innovative perspectives bring landscapes and urban scenes to life.
Without a doubt, Hector Acuna’s penchant for exploration is the prime driver in his art’s appeal. One painting focuses almost exclusively on the sky; another abstracts the landscape to the brink of recognition. A third is so severely horizontal that the viewer sits with the piece to figure out all the reasons for such an extreme format. And a fourth appears to have two smaller paintings of seemingly unrelated subject matter incorporated into its composition.
Details that many plein air painters would exclude instead boldly change the feel of a composition, as in “Yarn Bomb in Port,” with its post and plastic rope barrier in the bottom left of the piece. “There was a stairwell that was completely yarn-bombed, but when I turned around and saw the tree, I knew I wanted to paint that,” Acuna recalls. “I used a viewfinder to decide on the design; I wanted to use the trunks of the tree as pillars to build the composition. The amount of space I needed to show the trunks the way I wanted to included a view of that post, and I started to love what it did to the composition.”
The inclusion of cropped elements in a composition in this fashion is reminiscent of photography’s influence on Edgar Degas — although the artist never worked directly from photographs, he included everything visible in a scene. Acuna says he worked from photos in college, but even then, his approach was balanced by his experience of painting from life.
“Today I don’t often work from photos, but in the off season, I may,” he says. “Working from life, I avoid the shortcomings of photographs. I like the feel of painting a timeline as it unfolds when I’m en plein air. Everything is still in a photo, and I miss that sense of movement, that energy, that life that only exists in person.”
In college, Acuna taught foundational courses in drawing and painting. One course he taught, Planar Construction, forced him to restudy, reconsider, reevaluate, and delve deeply into skills previously learned.
“It was about learning how real-life dimensions can be translated into painting, and how to see volume as flat planes of space,” he recalls. “Teaching is the best way to learn, and that course taught me to convert life to flat planes. I started highlighting the geometry of shapes as the lead element in painting.”
This helps explain the intriguing and beguiling composition and feel of “16 Going on 17,” with its expanse of wall on the left and the jumble of geometric building shapes on the right. Together they work to create a split canvas, but one that seems to traverse the spectrum of an up-close look at one building and a distant look at building shapes. It’s an arresting composition that engages the mind, moving from a study of color to a statement about the urbanscape, evoking moments many of us have had in alleys, suggesting both organic color and human-made clutter.
The main place where his experimentation occurs is in the design of a composition. Acuna says that drawing, especially thumbnail sketches, is how he plays with variations and ideas. “It’s the one tool that is essential to my approach,” he says. “I make my own viewfinders out of cardstock or heavyweight construction paper. I have about 20 of them in different sizes and proportions. When I get to a painting spot, my first step is to look through one of my viewfinders. When I find the ratio I want, I trace the frame of the viewfinder in my sketchbook and sketch the composition within that drawn frame to get the same dimensions. I often do two or three different sketches before deciding on a composition.”
For plein air painting, Acuna usually paints in a modest scale, rarely going over 20 inches, but he has larger canvases in play. He started out painting on Masonite but found it too slick and smooth for his taste, and he finds linen prohibitively expensive. Instead, he paints on canvas wrapped over birch panels and builds frames for his work. He seals the canvas with two coats of polymer medium, then a gesso and titanium oil ground.
Using an essentially split primary palette with some convenience colors, he favors bristle brushes that help push the paint into the weave of the canvas. Sometimes the end of a painting session suggests a new direction, even if only through the paint left over on the palette. That’s how “Neighborhood Glow” came to be. The artist had an abundance of cadmium red left on his palette, so he experimented with making a painting that’s very warm in color temperature.
“I’ve also been experimenting with painting the same image three different ways using different ranges in value,” Acuna says. “I’ve been dipping into that exercise as a super useful way to think about intention. I’ll think something is a cool composition, but then ask myself what would happen if the majority of it is high-key.”
Similarly, he plays with slightly changing his perspective to include or exclude elements in the scene, always looking for something that surprises or presents a new challenge or idea. “What happens if I walk really close to a subject, and paint it from closer proximity? Or let a tiny sliver of an element show up and see how that changes the space? One view can be painted in almost endless ways if you start to dive into all the different factors or possibilities. I can pull back on the viewfinder and show a lot of the scene or otherwise push the optical sense of perspective, and that changes the way I feel about the space. It opens another avenue to think about creating and make an intentional decision.”
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